Help! My document is in PDF jail!

For some reason, over the past several weeks, I’ve received PDFs (Adobe Portable Document Files) that were password protected – and without the secret key, you’re all of a sudden in PDF jail with no way to get out. I emailed the document owners, but their response wasn’t timely enough for an “I need this right now” kind of person.

There’s a solution! In my quest to open the document, I remembered a site I had bookmarked in the past. SmallPDF.com is a useful online tool that allow you to not only remove a password lock from a PDF, it also unlocks your ability to convert PDFs into PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. From my several trials, it does a pretty good job of preserving the look of the resulting file-type into their respective documents.

As an educator, there’s quite a bit more you might think about when using this tool – like converting some of your old PDFs into online platform documents that don’t need a PDF reader to access them.